When it comes to House rules changes, most of the attention has been focused on Republicans’ abortive move to weaken the independent Office of Congressional Ethics. But there was another interesting attempt at a much more sweeping change that failed. Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., proposed abolishing the House Appropriations Committee.
Republicans Monday night separately rejected a proposal that would have dissolved the Appropriations Committee and put its discretionary spending authority in the hands of the authorizing committees, among other sweeping proposed changes to House rules…If approved, the Nunes amendment would have given the House Rules Committee until Nov. 1 to “reassign appropriations jurisdiction to the relevant standing or select committee.” In a letter sent to his colleagues on Dec. 30, Nunes urged House Republicans to “streamline the appropriations process, empower individual members of Congress and restore Congress’ constitutional authority.”
Needless to say, House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., “condemned” the proposal, and argued, among other things, that this would complicate the process, as there would be no parallel change in the Senate. But the idea isn’t crazy, and it’s actually been kicked around for several years. Why shouldn’t each committee appropriate money for the agencies it oversees? Why this powerful middleman that has a thumb in every spending bill, when the House could effectively allow all of its members to participate more actively in at least the part of the appropriations committee’s current duties?
Sen. John McCain R-Ariz., called for the abolition of the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2001, complaining of its nasty habit of quietly changing funding bills that had already been through their committees of jurisdiction. In that particular case, he complained that appropriators had quietly added a provision to a transportation bill that might have been a violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, without any negotiations:
We ought to abolish the Appropriations Committee. The Appropriations Committee has taken on so much power and so much authority. It was never envisioned that we would be here debating language in an appropriations bill that violates a treaty, a solemn treaty between three nations. If I seem exercised about it, I am because we are not giving every Senator the voice that they deserve in representing the people of their State when, on appropriations bills, language of this nature is added which has such profound impact not only on domestic but international relations.
The House Appropriations Committee has been around since the Civil War era, but that doesn’t make it sacrosanct. The process by which Congress spends money is clearly dysfunctional right now — perhaps there’s a better way of doing it.
